Heritage Council

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The Heritage Council’s mission is to engage, educate and advocate to develop a wider understanding of the vital contribution that our heritage makes to our social, environmental and economic well-being.

The National Biodiversity Data Centre

The National Biodiversity Data Centre was established in January 2007. Based at Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, the Centre is an initiative of the Heritage Council and is funded by the Heritage Council and the National Parks & Wildlife Service of the Department of the Arts, Heritage & the Gaeltacht. The Centre is operated under contract by Compass Informatics.

Ireland, along with its EU partners, has agreed to work towards the halting of biodiversity loss. If the loss of biodiversity is to be halted, the first stage is to identify what we have, where it occurs, and how its status is changing over time. The responsibility of the Data Centre is to mainstream the use of biological data, provide a national strategic focus for data collection, and ensure that comprehensive and reliable data are available to inform public policy and for use by researchers and conservationists.

The Data Centre works to make data on Ireland’s biological diversity available for the following specific uses: